Lewis always has had the most fluid and enigmatic role in Wire. If Colin Newman is the voice, the front man, and the “pop” craftsman, and now-retired guitarist Bruce Gilbert was the perverse noisemaker, art freak, and “spanner in the works,” Lewis was the Beat poet, the devilishly playful sex symbol, the charmingly eccentric but just a little scary weirdo, and the bridge between the band’s sonic extremes and dueling aesthetics, as capable of producing a gorgeous and touching ballad (see: “Rolling Upon My Day” by Dome, one of his many extracurricular side projects) as unleashing a tremendous amount of unfocused but intriguing clatter (witness significant stretches of Wire’s recently reissued 1981 oddity Document & Eyewitness), with plenty of forays into the industrial-dance underground along the way (as in his solo project He Said).

Strains of all of that work and more can be heard in the musician’s new two-fer, his first solo releases in the new millennium. He describes All Over as “a song-based album that resides amongst the cracks between narrative and song, sound and music… [which] conjures the spirit of Wire’s experimental pop trajectory.” Meanwhile, All Under is the Aphex Twin-like score to a 2003 film of the same name, plus a few other numbers in a similar vein. Really, though, the 16 tracks play as a satisfying whole, especially if you put them on shuffle, with the menacing clanking of alien death machines (the epic “No Show Godot”) nicely contrasting with skewed, almost optimistic art-pop (“Bluebird”) and even some Burroughs-like apocalyptic story-telling (via the musical short story “The Eel Wheeled,” and what a treat to hear that somber voice intone lines such as, “Highly trained and horrendously willing, he perpetrated many random explosions in the tri-state area”).

Lewis can introduce, explore, and abandon more ideas in one song than many bands have in a lifetime. Not all of them work, especially over such a broad canvas. But it’s certainly fun and inspiring to accompany him as he putters about in the studio, a crazed combination of Victor Frankenstein and Salvador Dalí.